


Itsy Bitsy Spider

by meanderingsoul



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Abduction, Dark, Implied/Referenced Torture, Interrogation, Light Angst, Memories, Multi, Not Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Worry, mentions of amputation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-08
Updated: 2015-02-08
Packaged: 2018-03-11 05:05:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3315167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meanderingsoul/pseuds/meanderingsoul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was easy for people to forget just what the Black Widow actually was. Natasha usually preferred it this way.</p><p>It was more convenient.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Itsy Bitsy Spider

 

Video clips had been uploaded one by one over the last couple of days, every 8 hours without mercy. No leads as to their origin. No demands or warnings to provide some hint of the organization behind them.

Narrowing down which organization it might be based simply on the level of violence committed and the hatred of Shield and its associates was near impossible. There were plenty. And that didn’t even begin to count the people who might just hate _her_.

The first video hadn’t contained much at all. No demands. Grey walls. Bragging.  _So we bagged the two useless Avengers, ones not even an Avenger really, just an office puke._

Coulson kept up the helpless, terrified, and out of his depth routine for 16 hours.

It was always good for a laugh, when he’d snuck in somewhere for an op to let himself be captured and she or Clint were the ones on the coms. She knew it was helping Clint to keep his head. Clint would become worried about Coulson far sooner than he’d become worried about himself.

(and her pretty bird didn't like rooms without windows)

After one of the more mentally articulate goons figured out his ruse, Coulson became much more like his normal self in the videos, quietly stoic with some helpful commentary on their techniques.

(he had the finest composure, her still deep water)

Things had quickly escalated after that - from simple shouting and punches, to nakedness, cold water, more severe beatings, to cattle prods and broken fingers. In the last moments of the last video someone had waved a knife at the camera.

Still no faces, no fingerprints, no logos. No lead for her to chase until either her heart burst red in her breast or she had both her lovers spun back close to her.

Clint had always had a hyena’s laugh, louder when frightened.

It had been three more hours since then.

There was so, so much she could accomplish with a small knife and three hours. 

Shield had pulled in this man simply on the suspicions of a few security guards. No one walked by their midtown Manhattan offices multiple times in a day just to grin at the building for a few minutes. No one who didn’t already know that it was more than just the corporate offices of a simple security firm.

He’d been sitting alone in an interrogation room for 30 minutes now. She'd watched him. A Mr. John Ryle. Bachelor, mid-thirties. No known affiliations, but he kept grinning periodically like he just couldn’t help himself. Fool.

Natasha finally looked up at Fury, as inscrutable as she’d been when Barton had first recruited her, years and lifetimes ago. “I need twenty minutes to work.”

"Romanoff…”

“I need twenty minutes to work.” A muscle ticked in her jaw.

It was the largest facial movement any of them had seen from her since this mess started 67 hours ago. No one had seen her sleep. 

“Like I was saying, Agent Romanoff you have 20 minutes. I am not turning off video or audio to that room during that time. During those 20 minutes I will be standing exactly where I’m standing now, am I entirely understood.”

Her security in working at Shield had always depended on a certain amount of willful ignorance by all the right people. Her medical records from on the job injuries were often skewed or misplaced at key moments.

Clint had been the first to find out by inevitability. She’d been injured on one of their very first two-person ops and had healed far, far too quickly to hide.

(but her pretty bird's hands always fluttered so light on her wounds, so she'd let him put in careful stitches she didn't need)

Coulson knew second, though maybe he’d suspected all along, those years in between, an opp when part of a building had fallen on her and Clint and she’d purposely taken the brunt of the hit, shoving Clint almost clear. She could survive.

But her right leg was mangled and she knew she was concussed. Clint was unconscious and no one else might _believe her_. She’d woken hazy on a stretcher to Coulson holding her hand so, so carefully and a doctor telling him they needed to amputate the leg above the knee, that there was no chance at all of surgical repair. She’d squeezed Coulson’s hand hard enough to make him look at her though she could barely feel her own fingers over the pain. His eyes had roiled under the surface.

"Don’t let them. Please don’t let them. It will heal, I promise. I just need some time. If you let them it will take _years_ to grow back. Don’t…”

But she’d lost consciousness again before she could be sure he'd understood.

The second time she’d woken there was an IV in her left arm, saline and minerals. The pain was still nearly blinding – no one had put her under.

Her leg was more leg-shaped than it had been before. Someone had flushed the wounds of debris, placed pressure bandages, padded around it with reddened gauze so it couldn’t wobble if she twitched. There was a chair wedged under the door handle and clumps of wires ripped out of the walls. Coulson was sitting next to her, still holding her right hand in his cool fingers. He had a pistol in the other.

It had to have been several hours.

Coulson smiled at her, just the corners of his mouth. “Clint woke up an hour ago, he’s going to be fine. Just bruises.”

She’d stared at him. He’d sat over her as an armed guard for hours, sabotaged this room, tended to a clearly ruined limb on his own just on the word of a professional liar.

He smoothed a hand over her hair before he tapped his earpiece. “If you’d like to send in Dr. Connor, I think he’ll find Agent Romanoff’s prognosis much improved.”

That had been eight years ago now, long years, and the calculated fiction of her capabilities had been very carefully maintained. Apparently Fury had long had suspicions, though she trusted that Coulson wouldn’t have given her away.

(her phillip, pip, pippa was such a quiet creature, liked to press his closed lips in the soft divot behind her ear)

Agent Hill only looked slightly confused by what was obviously a loaded conversation. She'd had no suspicions about field Agent Romanoff, Strike Team Delta, Level 7. That was about to change.

“Yes sir," the Black Widow said.

The cell door opened with a soft rasp of metal on metal, shut with a faint click. Behind it lay the entire world. In front of her was only one small man, desperately cocky and reeking of fear sweat. Right now the man was priority.

She sat down in across from him with subdued movements and clasped her hands up on the table in front of her.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked.

She knew what she looked like right now, still wearing the skinny jeans, cream sweater, and brown leather jacket from her day off, more than three days ago now. Slight shadows under her eyes. She hadn’t slept since she’d gotten the call that Agents Coulson and Barton had vanished during their lunch break. They'd probably ducked out for sandwiches.

She’d been out buying groceries. Complacent. Sometimes she liked to forget who she was.

He cleared his throat. “Yeah, the token lady Avenger. I know you sweetheart.”

“Do you know what they call me?”

(natalia talia natasha tasha nat gnat if clint was being a brat precious when coulson couldn't help himself)

“I do. Think the itsy bitsy spider might suit you better through.”

She gripped down on a blinding flare of rage, memories rising of roles reversed, an op gone wrong, two hours spent drugged blind with something that worked even on her mind. Reality had swum around her and her strange new handler had sung a child’s song about a spider in her ear over and over, grounding her until Clint had reached them.

Palm to table, loud.

Weight on right arm, easy.

Over the table, silent.

Sit in front of him, legs bent up at the knee, feet pinning upper arms, groin in front of his face, skull between her open knees, hands on the table because she didn't need them yet.

Much less smug now. She knew she'd moved too fast for human eyes to track properly.

“Do you find me frightening, Mr. Ryle?”

“How, how do you know my name?”

“We know most everything about you by now, Mr. Ryle.” They did. None of it had provided a lead.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked again.

“The Black Widow.”

“Would you like to know how I came to be called that?” He didn’t respond, beginning to sense that he was in far, far more danger than he’d previously thought.

Gloating never ended well.

“You see, people see spies as glamorous for some reason. The very, very best look like nobodies, office drones, blue collar failures, pretty little girls, tiny and harmless like a doll. So when a key player in the Russian arms race with America got cold feet, my former employers wished for his removal. So a red-headed escort came to dinner with him at a gala and up to his room that night and later in the dark someone murdered him, crushed his throat. Of course, rumors had it that I ripped his throat out with my bare teeth after sex, but you know how rumors are.”

She held her expression neutral.

He gulped then tried for bravado again. “What do you mean the _Cold_ War? No offence sweetheart, you can't be out of your twenties, but nice try. They send you in to soften me up for the big boys? Cause lemme tell you…”

“Best guess I have is that I am in my late sixties.” She said it offhandedly, a simple fact.

He stared. They'd be staring outside too.

“Bullshit.”

She could feel him trembling under the soles of her shoes. She raised his chin with one finger and he flinched at her touch.

"Look me in the eyes. I've been a spy since I was a child. The first time I assassinated someone I was 10. I've tortured children in front of their parents, barred the doors to a hospital full of people and burned it to the ground to take out just one man. I've had my left fingers cut off one by one just to try and slow me down. Someone even collapsed a cave I was in to try to escape me, but I survived by eating the corpse nearest to me until I could dig myself out and kill them. I've killed more people than I can count and plenty of them were in bed with me at the time. I don't care about your organization or its goals. You are just one unimportant little sack of meat except for the fact that to me, you are what’s standing between me and my mates and you have no idea what that means to me.”

None of this information had been previously available to Shield, but it was too late for such concerns now. Hawkeye’s hands were invaluable and would not heal like hers, Coulson had old injuries these days, and Shield still had far too little information for her to work with.

“So I'm going to give you ten minutes to think about that. Then I'm going to start removing bits of you to share with your employer until I get a result I approve of. I’m Russian, or I was. They’re very efficient that way.”

“They won't let you do this, you’re government, and my bosses…”

“Then I suggest you answer all the questions you are about to be asked. You are right, I doubt my current employers care for my methods any more than yours will care about your suffering, but I think eventually you'll provide me with something, even if that is only some small measure of satisfaction." She gripped his throat between two fingers, just two. "And if they won't let me, I will take you and we’ll go somewhere where I know what's left of you will never see the light of day again. You should consider accepting the prison cell that might come to you if you cooperate instead. You might stay whole that way. You see, it was my turn to cook dinner and my mate’s know better than to be late for that.”

He stayed silent as she left.

Maria Hill was slightly pale, lips pressed together. She did not look at Natasha.

Fury was unreadable.

She wasn’t surprised by their reactions, though she might miss the regard she was used to having from them.

But _they_ were worth it, all of it, any of it. 

“Let me know when you have acquired the necessary information or when I need to return to acquire it.” Her uniform was downstairs. Natasha Romanoff was completely unnecessary for the moment, so the Black Widow needed to change.

 

**Author's Note:**

> So half of this has been on my computer since The Avengers came out. Instead of working on my longfic, or literally anything else I should be doing, I went ahead and finished it. So far the MCU seems to be implying it won't be using the Infinity Serum, so this is I guess not-canon Natasha. Looking forward to what we might find out in AOU. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> (edited 6/2017)


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